An occasional blog of our activities for the LGBT History Project with the odd post on subjects connected to LGBT History generally. Contact us at lgbthistoryproject@hotmail.co.uk. You can download our 2016 magazine here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24371157/P2P-2016.pdf

Wednesday, 26 February 2014

LGBT Russia

Over the
next few pages, I have collated a few snippets about a number of LGBT Russians.
Let’s start with:

A Russian LGBT Timeline (1)

16-19th
century: there were many reports from Europeans of unabashed same-sex affection
in public; Sergei Soloviev wrote that “nowhere, either in the Orient or in the
West, was this vile, unnatural sin taken as lightly as in Russia.”

17th
century: homosexual relations banned within the military by Peter the Great.

1832:
Article 995, outlawing muzhelozhstvo (sodomy) was introduced into civil law, complete
with a 5 year sentence in Siberia. However, it was largely ignored, especially among
the elite.

The Golden
Age for gays in Russia was roughly the turn of the century until 1933. During
this time, important figures like Vladimir Nabokov’s father, a legislator in
the original Russian Duma, argued that the state shouldn’t criminalise private
sexual acts. In 1906, Mikhail Kuzhmin (2) published Wings, the first coming out
book printed in Russia (3) and one of the most talked-about books of its day.
In the fields of ballet, the arts, and even the Imperial Court there were
various accounts of gay men living fairly openly and in 1917, when the Bolsheviks
came to power and revamped the entire civil code, Article 995 was abolished and
gays, women, and minorities freer than ever before. Even then, however, Kuzhmin’s
poetry remained fairly bleak:

December
frosts the rosy sky,

Black the
rooms of this unheated house;

And we, ...

We read the
Bible and we wait

We wait. And
do we know what for?

Can it be
for a redeeming hand? (1920)

The
Bolsheviks were never comfortable with human sexuality and much of the
literature of the time treated homosexuality as a curable illness; however,
criminalising sodomy was seen by the Bolsheviks as backward and bourgeois and
allowed only in “lesser” republics like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Finally
Stalin, in 1933, approved Article 121 as part of his (Putin-like) return to
“family” values, outlawing muzhelozhstvo coupled with a 5 year sentence, or
worse.

1933-1993:
Russian society during Stalin’s rule and throughout the Soviet period tended to
understand homosexuality as part of paedophilia and muzhelozhstvo became an easy
way to purge undesirables from the government. During Kruschev’s cultural thaw the
focus seemed to change somewhat, from protecting children to protecting other men,
most commonly in prison. Few records of enforcement of Article 121 from the
1930s through to the 1970s have been found but several thousand men were
charged with muzhelozhstvo every year during the 1980s.

"Pleshkas",
gay cruising sites common during the Soviet period, were recently painted by artist
Yevgeniy Fiks (4); ironically, pleshkas tended to be near Soviet monuments and statuary.

1993-2013:
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, laws criminalising muzhelozhstvo were
again taken off the books, this time as an outreach to the West. The ’90s saw a
relative thaw in Moscow and the larger cities with a small gay press, dance
clubs, etc. Some journalists reported seeing out gay couples on the streets.
Following Putin’s rise in 1999, muzhelozhstvo once more found its way into the
news cycle; a law banning it was proposed in 2002 (it lost) and then the oblast
(region, district) of Ryazan in 2006 passed a law now commonly known as the “anti-gay
propaganda” law. Two organisations were founded in response, Gayrussia.ru (5)
and the Russian LGBT network (6) and a (banned) parade has been held in Moscow
every year since May 2006. Steadily since 2006 when Ryazan spearheaded the
anti-gay campaign and LGBT rights activists reacted, the more conservative
elements of Russian society began to coalesce and leaders from various religions
(as well as the mayor of Moscow in 2007) openly condemned the parades.

Bans on
homosexual propaganda, 2006- 2013: What began in Ryazan spread, within 6 years,
to 9 other oblasts including St Petersburg. Contrary to recent comparisons made
between Nazi Germany and Russia, Putin did not spearhead anti-gay sentiment and
did not regularly make public statements against muzhelozhstvo. These efforts
have largely been grass roots and led by coalitions of religious and fringe
skinhead groups which have focused primarily on paedophiles. Even so, as their
popularity has grown, Putin has formally embraced the new laws, especially
since anti-Putin protests gained prominence in 2012.

June 2013:
the Russian state Duma passed a federal ban on "propaganda of
nontraditional sexual relations".

Many readers
will be familiar with the well publicised goings on in Russia since the passage
of this new law - LGBT people beaten in the streets, outspoken LGBT people
fired from their jobs, adoption rights taken away, etc. This new law goes
farther than any law before in Russian history and is much savvier than the
bans in the past of simple muzhelozhstvo - the new law sets the terms of the
conversation, determining that any discussion of gays necessarily includes a
discussion of paedophiles and the protection of children while, because sodomy
is not explicitly banned, the Russian government can maintain that there is no
discrimination against gay people per se.

3. Radclyffe
Hall's The Well of Loneliness was not published until 1928 and while EM Forster
wrote Maurice in 1913-14, it was not published until 1971, after his death the
year before. Wings is still in print and available for purchase.

Some favourite links

About Me

One of several old horses interested in having his nosebag in nice, local restaurants. Also part of a trio of amateur historians rummaging through the National Archives for traces of hidden LGBT history.